Currently, Internet based advertising wherein buyers of advertising space seek to directly transact with specific sellers is a complex, manually intensive process whereby buyers and sellers commit to purchases through largely non-automated, manual mechanisms such as telephone, e-mail and faxing of contractual terms and banner advertisement creative files or buyer tags. The advertisements are then fulfilled by loading these creatives/banners/buyer tags manually into the publisher's serving mechanisms such as an adserver, as well as manually auditing performance of the contracts and reconciling payments after delivery of the contract. Many entities that have a large Internet presence (i.e.: a large numbers of visitors to their sites) have a large sales forces selling their advertising space either directly to advertisers or to agencies and networks who represent advertisers. Surprisingly, most of the work performed by these large sales forces is quite manual intensive both on contracting for sales of the advertising space as well as in the fulfillment/loading of the advertisements for delivery per the contractual terms, and auditing performance and reconciling payments upon delivery.
Various other keyword and auction-based automated Internet advertising systems also exist. However, these systems are “closed” in that the buyers do not directly, openly interact with the sellers of adspace. An example of such a system is Google's “AdSense” system. Instead, in these systems, buyers and sellers are separated from each other by a technological system that automatically matches buyer with seller in real-time, based on a variety of parameters such as context, but does not reveal who the matched counterparty is. Moreover, as mentioned, the ad space in these systems is sold “real-time’ or “spot” to the highest bidder as the impression/hit arrives on the seller's site on that day. These systems provide an elegant means of monetizing unsold/excess inventory that the direct sales force of the site was unable to sell directly to a buyer prior to that date on which the impression/hit arrives on the page.
The direct sales force of the seller typically sells inventory in the future, well before the impression or hit arrives on the site. Using forecasted estimates of future site hits/views volume data, the sales force works directly, through manual processes, with advertisers, agencies and buyers to ensure sell out of these ad impressions, prior to those impressions/hits arriving. Note, in this manual process, both buyer and seller have full transparency on who the related parties are. When inventory goes unsold through direct sales, or sudden excess above forecast is experienced on the site, that inventory is deployed into “closed” real-time bidding systems such as Google's AdSense™, Yahoo's RightMedia™, to “fill” the remaining, unsold inventory on a real-time basis.
As stated above, inefficiencies exist for large, direct sellers of Internet advertising space (due to existing processes being complex and paper intensive). In addition, however, inefficiencies also exist for small sellers and purchasers of Internet advertising space. For example, for those website operators that have a small presence (i.e.: a small numbers of visitors to their sites), or a smaller direct sales force organization, it has proven harder to seek out purchasers for their advertising space. This is partially due to the fact that it is desirable that purchasers' advertisements “match” with the content of the sellers' websites. For example, someone wishing to post advertising relating to technology products would want to display such advertising on websites devoted to technology. It is difficult for small sellers of advertising space to seek out purchasers for their advertising space as they do not have an automated means or large enough sales force through which to efficiently communicate future ad space availabilities to a broad reach of potentially matching advertisers or ad space purchasers.
In addition, it has proven hard for purchasers of Internet advertising space to seek out small sellers of such advertising space. This is partially due to the fact that it has also proven difficult for small sellers of advertising space to seek out purchasers whose advertising suitably “matches” their websites.
Finally, purchasers of future ad space today often find that they are unable to efficiently resell the unwanted excess ad inventory (i.e. through automated means). Excess future ad inventory in purchasers' hands today results from anticipated business needs failing to materialize or alternatively due to the purchased inventory failing to perform to the advertisers' expectations. There are no systems currently that enable an efficient resale of this excess or unwanted future inventory, for a means of reducing financial asset exposure to that inventory or for the purposes of extracting an economic profit from that inventory. No adspace futures trading capabilities exist today.
What is instead desired is a more centralized system of openly/transparently matching sellers and purchasers for future/forward sales of Internet advertising space as a complement to the activities of the seller's direct sales force. It is especially desirable that such a system would assist both small purchasers and small sellers of advertising space, such that purchasers and sellers could quickly and easily find one another over the Internet. Such a system would ideally function as a tradable, futures/forward market for the buying, selling and reselling/trading of Internet advertising space.